Disclaimer: Technical advice given in these guides indicates the level of professionality required to be accepted on MyFonts, as well as ways to improve the production level and marketability of your fonts. Tips regarding marketing, pricing and licensing are meant as informal advice to help you decide how to work with MyFonts’ marketing tools, and incentives to think about various business options. None of these tips is a guaranteed recipe or watertight recommendation to maximize your profit; a font’s success depends on many factors for which its designer(s) and foundry are responsible.

Getting Started on MyFonts

Contents

This document describes the various aspects of publishing your fonts through MyFonts.

The creative, technical, legal and promotional aspects of making and selling fonts will be discussed in greater detail in a series of Foundry Guides to be published on MyFonts.

What is MyFonts?

MyFonts is an open marketplace that sells digital typefaces from over 1,000 foundries. MyFonts itself is not a foundry. We sell fonts created by others but make none of our own.

MyFonts is not a curated collection of typefaces. Everyone is welcome, provided their fonts are well-made and usable, respect basic conventions (e.g. glyph encoding), and are not unauthorized copies of existing typefaces or lettering. We have a Foundry Review Board to assess this and give feedback about fonts submitted.

About this document

For designers and foundries who want to work with MyFonts as their distributor, we highly recommend that you read these foundry guides. Likely they will contain answers to many licensing, marketing, pricing, selling process, and font requirements questions.

We’ll be covering the various aspects of making and selling fonts in a nutshell:

Designing and preparing fonts

Understanding copyright and originality

Submitting your fonts to MyFonts

Using tools for promoting your fonts

Working with online sales reports

Setting up payment options

Sending additional fonts or updates for existing fonts

…and more.

New foundries

Submitting your work to MyFonts

If your foundry* hasn’t done business with MyFonts before, we require that you apply by sending us information about yourself and your company, as well as complete font files of the first typeface(s) you want to publish. Our Foundry Review Board will assess the fonts to decide if they comply with our minimum criteria regarding originality, completeness (glyph set) and technical execution. In cases where the review team decides the fonts are basically OK, but need some improvements, we conditionally accept you as a foundry on MyFonts, pending the successful completion of required changes, outlined in feedback provided in your acceptance email.

*Even if you’re a designer operating by yourself, we regard you as a foundry.

Designing and preparing fonts

As the world’s largest font vendor, MyFonts has a responsibility to its customers; we can’t offer badly-made fonts. So we’ve put in place some requirements for new fonts regarding design, technical requirements and character sets.

Design: originality

Some of the greatest fonts on the market are based on existing lettering or typefaces.
There are, however, quite a few no-go areas when it comes to copying or imitating the work of others.

It is not OK to copy glyphs, or parts of glyphs, found in currently available fonts.

It is not OK to take the lettering work of a living designer (or even one that has been dead for less than 70 years) and make it into a font without their explicit permission, or the permission of their heirs.

It’s downright illegal to use digital font files from others to base your font on – even if you change those files completely.

All of this can be regarded as plagiarism, and can get you into legal trouble with the copyright holders of the original work. MyFonts does not provide legal assistance, and reserves the right to deactivate fonts pending the outcome of reasonable plagiarism claims.

Here are a few of the type design approaches that are ethically OK:

Sketching and drawing a type family from scratch based on your own ideas.

Scanning your own handwriting, lettering or calligraphy and making it into a font – or using the work of somebody who has agreed to this.

The TypeRight Guide to Ethical Type Design is an excellent summary of the ethics of type design. It will help designers understand what is OK and what is not OK when designing fonts that may in some way benefit from the work of other type designers.

Font design and production

We expect our designers and foundries to know about making fonts. Notions such as path direction, outline optimization, removing overlaps, glyph (or character) sets and kerning should be familiar concepts to you. If they’re not, online sources such as these may help in getting you going:

Making faces

There are now several programs and apps that allow you to quickly turn drawings and sketches into fonts, or construct an alphabet from simple shapes like circles and squares, and generate a font. The results are not professional fonts. They can work fine for your own or your friends’ use, but to prepare a font for retail and for use by third parties, more fine-tuning is needed. The font file has to be cleaned up, optimized and completed in a font editor such as FontLab Studio, Fontographer, Glyphs, FontCreator, RoboFont, FontForge, or FontMaster.

Font design programs will enable you to clean up and optimize paths, remove overlaps, automate repeating tasks, make alphabets more consistent, and control the output and metadata such as copyright notices.

Character sets

MyFonts has an international customer base. So most fonts — except picture fonts and highly decorative faces — need to have complete character sets including accented letters, along with other characters such as curly quotes, international currency symbols and complete punctuation.

MyFonts has established a Basic Character Set that is required for all display fonts except those that are primarily decorative in nature such as dingbat and initial caps fonts, or purely experimental alphabetic fonts. For text fonts we recommend a more extended set, and for Pro fonts there are two more levels of recommended glyph sets.

Kerning

As you probably know, kerning is the correction of letterspacing for specific kerning pairs, from “Av” to “Tü”. Don’t forget that many MyFonts users will be using your fonts for other languages. So make sure that you include kerning pairs that might not necessarily occur in English, such as “Aufhalten (ja, auf) Wolf? Torf Tell”.

Based on a text in Robert Bringhurst’s book Elements of Typographic Style, this test document on the German Typefacts blog is a great tool for double-checking your kerning.

Embedding

Font buyers expect to be able to embed fonts into PDFs for print and preview. We strongly suggest that you set the embedding flags to allow such embedding and to ensure that your license is consistent with this.

Testing

You are responsible for verifying that your fonts work in all the environments they are intended for. At a minimum, make sure that your fonts work with applications that come built into operating systems.

For Mac OS X, this includes Font Book and TextEdit. Your fonts should, of course, validate with Font Book. We also recommend that you check your fonts with Word as it has some quirks regarding its font handling.

For Windows, check that your fonts work with WordPad and that for families with multiple styles, all styles can be selected from WordPad’s font menu.

Look out for clipping problems (i.e. the partial clipping of ascenders and descenders that “stick out too much”) in Windows applications, as Windows uses its own values for ascent and descent metrics.

Please also test with as many applications as possible that are commonly used with fonts. Microsoft Word, Adobe CS (Creative Suite) and CC (Creative Cloud) products, CorelDraw, and Quark XPress are the most important in this respect.

Getting professional help

If you need help preparing your fonts for submission, or fixing reported issues/problems, here are some contacts for people who may be able to help you:

Igino Marini: www.iKern.com, for specialized spacing and kerning service

Preparing font packages

Font formats

The primary font formats required today are OpenType (.OTF) and TrueType (.TTF). Older formats such as Mac PostScript, Windows PostScript and Mac TrueType are now considered to be obsolete are no longer sold.

We recommend that you create one package for each style by zipping each font file.

If you decide to submit both TTF and OTF versions of each style, we recommend that you include both formats in each package. That way, customers don’t have to decide which format to select when they buy your fonts.

We also require that you submit a zip file corresponding to your family pack that includes all font files that make up the family. Additionally, we’ll need the price you wish to charge users for your family pack. You may also sell sub-family packs, which are curated packages containing a selection of styles from the family.

How do I send my stuff to MyFonts?

To submit your fonts, please email the files themselves or a link to download the files (like dropbox or dropsend) to foundrysupport@myfonts.com.

Preparing additional information

In order to display your fonts in a compelling manner, MyFonts needs additional material.
A template is available for use in preparing this material.

This includes:

Information about your foundry (name, contact info, web site, logo)

Information about each font family being submitted:

font family name

origin

designer

release date

brief article summarizing the history, features and recommended applications for the font

a family flag PDF image in 1:1 ratio, formatted as outline PDF or at least 400×400 pixels PNG file

one or more posters in 2:1 ratio, formatted as outline PDF or at least 1440×720 pixels PNG files

Information about the font designer including a brief bio and photo if possible.

To recap: We’ll need your font file(s), required graphics, font description, and prices for each new family you submit.

Importing your fonts

When MyFonts receives the information for your first import, we will set up a foundry page for your foundry, person pages for each new designer that you list, and we import your fonts. Once the font files are imported, each new font family page is edited to include the images, article and pricing options you provide. Once the import is complete, we will inform you that your fonts are available for review on our test server “stage-new.myfonts.com”. This is where we host changes before they go live, to allow you to check that no mistakes have been made and to correct any errors or omissions prior to releasing updates to the live site.

Once the fonts are approved, they will normally appear on the live site within one business day.

Webfonts

If you sign up for webfonts, we will offer most or all of your fonts as webfonts. You don’t need to provide us with any special formats, our system automatically creates webfont files. Customers who purchase webfonts will be able to download a webfont kit and incorporate it into their websites.

Webfont prices start at the same price as your corresponding desktop font.

Customers with larger websites and heavy traffic pay more based on the number of page views.

To sign up and enable your fonts as webfonts, please go to the sign up page where you will be able to see an FAQ, and review the sign-up documents. After you sign up, the webfont option will appear for all of your fonts within a few days.

Extended Licenses: Mobile App, ePub, Server

Extended licenses are for common use-cases beyond what is allowed by a standard desktop license.

Up-selling

If a customer needs a mix of licenses for a font, we will give a 50% discount on the lowest price license. This encourages customers to buy extra licenses.

For example, a $20 font will also be available as a webfont at $20, and customers can buy the original desktop font along with the webfont for $30.

Marketing and Promotion

Getting your fonts to appear on MyFonts is only the first step towards becoming a designer. With tens of thousands of fonts available from MyFonts, it will take some effort on your part to get noticed.

Helping customers find your fonts

There are several things you can do to make it easier for customers to find and remember your fonts such as:

Tags. A relevant set of tags will help your fonts appear in search results. Just click Tag It icon on any font family page to add tags for that family. Tags can be removed by clicking the ‘-’ sign against the appropriate tag. Adding too many tags tends to dilute the effectiveness of all your tags. A well focused set of tags is the best strategy.

Posters. Posters are the large samples in 2:1 ratio that appear on the Font Family pages and on the home page’s carousel. They help make a font family more attractive and memorable. Posters are 1440×720 pixels and should be saved in PNG or PDF formats.

Gallery images. PDF samples and specimen brochures showing off a family help show prospective users what a font can do.

Inbound links. Be sure to add links from other websites to your font families at MyFonts. It will help users both directly and indirectly by boosting the Google ranking for your font family pages.

Promoting your fonts on our site and beyond

The MyFonts website and newsletters offer a wide array of ways in which fonts can be publicized and promoted. Some of these are automated; some—like the newsletters—are put together by our team.
There are also tools that foundries can use when and how they wish (within certain rules). Here’s an overview of our main promotional tools.

What’s New

MyFonts takes the first step by listing your new fonts in the What’s New section. In addition, a randomly selected set of new fonts appears under the heading of Recent Fonts on MyFonts front page. Please note that fonts need to be available as webfonts to be eligible to appear in the Recent Fonts section.

Discounts

Foundries often decide to draw attention to their new releases by giving temporary discounts. Lately, high introductory discounts (-70% to -90%) have proved very effective in getting new families noticed and attain enough sales for a prominent spot on Hot New Fonts (see below). Some of the best and most original font families remained popular after the discount expired and have kept selling at full price. Others have been less successful.

Extreme discounts alone are seldom enough for lasting success. In the long run, it is quality and usability that users value most. For more about discounting, please read our guide about Pricing Fonts.

Setting up a discount promotion

Foundries can set up limited-time discounts on their products using our Promotions Editor tool. Foundries often see success when launching a new font with an introductory discount in order to generate interest.

Using our Promotions Editor tool, you can upload a promotion poster, specify the start date, the percentage off, and the number of days the promotion will run. You can also create secret codes for discounts only available to customers who receive the code from you.

After a promotional discount is set up, the poster will appear on the Specials page. The poster will also appear occasionally on the MyFonts homepage, and related family pages. In addition, the prices on the family pages will be shown crossed out with the discounted price shown in red.

Promotions can run up to 45 days and may not include fonts that were on special, or whose price has changed, during the 45 days immediately preceding the promotion. Font prices are not allowed to be changed during the promotion, 45 days prior to a promotion, or 45 days after a promotion.

Tips:

Keep your offers simple, making it easy for customers to take advantage of your special offers.

Make your offers worthwhile. 10% or 20% off usually does not generate many click-throughs.

Hot New Fonts

Any font that is purchased within the first 50 days after it first appears on MyFonts is eligible for a position on the Hot New Fonts list. This list automatically ranks the fifty best-selling fonts that appeared within the preceding 50 days according to their relative sales volume (in dollar value, not copies sold).

Please note that only font families that have 400×400 flags and are enabled as webfonts will be eligible for inclusion on the Hot New Fonts list.

Because people tend to buy fonts that are popular, the Hot New Fonts list tends to amplify success. Most fonts that get into the top four slots stand an excellent chance of getting into the main MyFonts top 50 Best Sellers list.

Best Sellers

The Best Sellers list is open to all font families on MyFonts. Best Sellers are the 50 top selling families in the last month.

Newsletters: Rising Stars

Every month, MyFonts sends out a newsletter called Rising Stars. Rising Stars showcases the best of the Hot New Fonts list — a possibly varied selection from the best sellers of the preceding 30 days. This provides additional lift to those fonts that make it to the top of the Hot New Fonts list within 50 days of their debut. To be eligible, it is a prerequisite that fonts are available in cross-platform OpenType format and are licensed as web fonts as well.

Rising Stars also has a Text Fonts of the Month section, selected by the editors from recent well-equipped text fonts. Webfont licensing is not a prerequisite here.

Rising Stars goes out to over a million MyFonts users who have signed up for it. Each newsletter is permanently accessible from our newsletters archive.

Creative Characters

Every month, MyFonts sends out a newsletter called Creative Characters. Each issue features one designer or foundry. Candidates are selected based on the editor’s opinion of what readers would find most interesting together with suggestions we receive from readers.

Creative Characters goes out to over a million MyFonts users who have signed up for it. Each newsletter is permanently accessible from our newsletters archive.

Sales Reports & Royalties

Accessing your Sales Reports

Once your fonts are live, we will add a link to real-time sales reports on your MyFonts user account home page. This will give you up-to-the-minute sales results and analysis tools so that you will have a good idea how well your fonts are doing.

Royalty Payments

MyFonts offers foundries a choice of several electronic payment methods. Payments for sales during each calendar month are sent out within 45 days of the end of that sales month. The available payment methods are:

PayPal for anyone with a PayPal account, as long as your payment is between $100 and $10,000

If any monthly payment does not reach the minimum payment threshold for payment method, we will hold the payment and add it onto the next month. As soon as your accumulated payments have reached the threshold, you will be paid the full amount at the next payment cycle.

Additional Fonts

When you have additional fonts you wish to offer, please package them just like the original set of fonts, and email them to us. Only font-specific information in the information template is needed.

Updates

If you need to update one or more font packages, all we need is a set of the new font packages, and a short description of the nature of the update. Please make sure that the contents of the new packages correspond to the same set of styles in the original packages. That enables us to import the new files, find the old versions, apply the old prices to the new versions, and disable the old versions.

Once an update goes to the live site, we will send an email to everyone who purchased the earlier version informing him or her that a new version is available. We will include in this e-mail your description of the nature of the update. This helps users decide whether or not they need to download the new version.

For bug fixes, such updates are free to customers. However, if you update a package with a new version that includes more characters or more fonts in a family collection, please feel free to specify a price to charge the customer for the update.

Price changes

If you need to make permanent price changes to your fonts, please send an email to foundrysupport@myfonts.com detailing the changes. The simplest way is to send us a table of old and corresponding new prices.

Price changes tend to be disruptive for users so think carefully before making changes and try to keep them constant for as long as possible. For temporary discounts, or to try the effect of a different price, please use the promotion editor.

As discussed above, price changes are not allowed within a certain period after a discount — see under “Discounts”.

Removing Fonts or Packages

If you need to permanently remove a font, send an email to foundrysupport@myfonts.com requesting that the font family be removed. Please tell us why it is being removed so that we can include it in the log and explain to customers who ask about it.

Please note that when a font is removed, packages purchased by customers up to that point will remain in their order histories so that they can download a fresh copy should it be needed.

Conclusion

This document is the first chapter in a series that, we hope, will help our partner foundries become profitable and sustainable businesses. We can’t promise that there’s a magic formula for success as an independent digital foundry, but by paying attention to the guidelines laid down here, we expect anyone selling through our platform to least get the fundamentals right. The rest, with some help from the more specific titles to follow this one, is up to you!

Hundreds of people contact MyFonts each year, hoping to sell their fonts through us, in order to reach the world’s largest customer base for fonts. On average, one new foundry comes knocking at our door each day.

MyFonts has a team of specialists to assess whether the fonts submitted by new, aspiring foundries are original, well-made, and technically sound. In order to be accepted your fonts should be:

well-drawn

well-produced

complete

original

We expect each of our designers and foundries to be dedicated, have a professional attitude, and be sincere in how they approach their work and the type trade. We now accept about one out of every four new foundries.

But let’s start at your end: do you need us?

Do you want to be a foundry?

MyFonts is a retail platform (some say “distributor,“ or “reseller” instead) that works for and with foundries — from very large font libraries to one-person foundries. MyFonts is not a foundry: we don’t publish any typefaces of our own.

When we work with individual designers, we regard them as independent foundries. In other words: businesses that are responsible for their own design and production, decisions about promotion, and more.

So the first question you need to ask yourself is: do I want to be my own foundry?

Let’s assume you’re an independent creative and you know what you are doing, font-wise. Your concepts, outline drawings and family structures are well thought-out. You have one or more typeface families in the works that are (almost) ready to hit the market as retail fonts. So — you’re a type designer. But does that necessarily make you an aspiring type foundry owner? Is the prospect of starting up your own independent foundry attractive to you? The alternative is to sign up with an existing foundry — one that accepts unsolicited submissions (see below).

Here are some pros and cons of starting up your own foundry.

Becoming a foundry: advantages

Most decisions — about design, technology, timing, business, promotion, licensing, and more — are your own.

You don’t depend on any other company’s decisions on suitability or timing when it comes to being ready to release a new font.

You earn a portion of each sale. As a rule, this is a higher percentage than you’d earn if you signed up with an existing foundry.

You can decide how many retailers you want to work with, and which ones these should be. You can even open up your own web shop alongside these distributors, hoping to earn even more if buyers know where to find you.

Becoming a foundry: disadvantages

You must have some business acumen.

Besides making fonts, you'll need to run other parts of your business: administration, promotion design, replying to error reports, etc.

You will need to produce retail-ready fonts. Font production can be quite a big deal, and the advent of complex OpenType programming has raised the bar. By contrast, if you work with an existing foundry they may take your design off your hands when the fonts themselves are done, and take care of the technical issues that require specialist knowledge.

As expert type designer Kent Lew, whose work is published by Font Bureau, wrote in a comment on Typographica.org:

“Beyond the glyph drawing and spacing/kerning, there are increasingly more complicated technical aspects to be handled — from proper name fields and ascent/descent parameters to OTL feature writing, etc. A foundry will offer final production (as well as quality control and tech support). Some distributors may offer some assistance, but for the most part consider you the foundry and hold you responsible. Going it alone, of course, requires you to manage it all yourself.”

So being your own foundry means to be a bit of a font engineer/programmer as well — in other words a font developer.

Signing up with a foundry

If the above sounds daunting or unattractive, and you’d rather spend all your time on actually making type, then signing up with an existing foundry can be a better option.

Several of the larger libraries — including Monotype’s collections Linotype, Monotype, and FontFont — are open to unsolicited proposals. Many smaller foundries, however, prefer working with people they know and invite personally. Attending type conferences or doing workshops can be a good way to get to know people in the business, and present your work.

Working with a foundry: advantages

Some foundries will perform all font production tasks for you, or offer advice and assistance on completing font families.

Foundries help protect your work, take action against piracy and misuse.

You can (almost) fully concentrate on drawing type.

Working with a foundry: disadvantages

You have very little say in pricing, marketing, packaging, choice of retail platforms, etc.

You only receive a relatively small percentage of each sale. Also, you may be obligated to assign your IP (intellectual property) rights to the foundry. This is one of the biggest differences compared to running your own foundry.

If you have ambition as a type designer, not every foundry is a good match. This is what type expert Stephen Coles has to say:

“Questions to ask yourself about a foundry:

Is the library a good fit for my style of type?

What production assistance do they offer?

Where are the foundry’s fonts sold and how are they marketed?

What is the length of the contract agreement?” *

How about going it alone and only selling directly?

Once your mind has been made up about starting your own foundry, the million-dollar question is: do I need distributors at all?

There is something to be said for going it alone. When selling directly to customers, via your web shop or by talking to them in person, there are personal and financial rewards to be had — if you have the energy, inventiveness and staying power to make your shop a success.

Managing your own exclusive retail platform: advantages

You have complete control over your brand, image, and publicity.

You can build up interesting and rewarding relationships with users.

You get to keep most of the revenue.

Your work will obtain an aura of exclusivity.

This may be good for your prestige in the typographic world.

Exclusivity may enable you to avoid low pricing and discounts.

Managing your own retail platform: disadvantages

Choosing to keep the full profit of your sales sounds like a no-brainer. But 100% of zero is zero; and luring customers to a small foundry’s web shop is hard work.

You need quite a bit of business acumen.

You are likely to spend considerable time doing other things than making fonts — or hire people to do it for you: administration, promotion and advertising, sales and invoicing, social networking, investment in equipment and assistance, legal stuff.

You’re responsible for customer support and will personally have to answer calls and emails from customers concerning orders, payment, updates or technical issues.

Is MyFonts right for you?

Let’s assume at this point that you have decided that: (a) starting up a foundry looks like a great idea, and (b) working with retail platforms is better than doing it all alone. Now when it comes to choosing your retailers, what are your motives for choosing MyFonts?

Working with MyFonts: advantages

MyFonts is the world’s largest retail platform for fonts, with millions of customers.

MyFonts is a level playing field, where all foundries have equal chances of making it.

We have two helpdesks based on both sides of the Atlantic: a Customer Helpdesk and a Foundry Helpdesk. The teams are small, but each member has built up considerable expertise over the years. Prompt and personal help are priorities.

Foundries have a lot of freedom to decide about pricing and promotions, and to make changes fast.

MyFonts has various admin tools that enable foundries to monitor their sales almost in real-time and make quick decisions about pricing, promotions or packaging.

Foundries can use their own website to lead users to MyFonts, and can sign up as affiliates in order to increase their percentage of the sales.

MyFonts offers a range of promotion tools, mostly based on objective data concerning revenue and popularity; we have two newsletters a month that go out to around 1.4 million addresses (2015), plus a popular overview of the most successful fonts of the year.

MyFonts offers a unique pay once system for web fonts, which many customers prefer over yearly rent, while maintaining control over pageviews.

MyFonts offers smartly-priced licenses for specialized uses, such as Apps, ePub, Server, and OEM. For the latter, Monotype’s sales team sometimes brings in large corporate contracts.

Working with MyFonts: possible disadvantages

True to the “level playing field” principle, MyFonts offers little room for “staff picks” and curatorial decisions. Most promotion goes to fonts that sell well.

In other words: making high-quality fonts does not guarantee you attention on MyFonts.

Many customers look at our What’s New and Hot New Fonts lists. So new fonts get most attention. If your production is low, there may be periods of low sales — unless you manage to have a long-seller; several designers do.

In case of customer complaints about technical issues, MyFonts will ask foundries to fix font files as soon as possible.

Now back to what MyFonts wants — and what we think our customers deserve.

Are you ready for MyFonts?

MyFonts is a professional platform that offers digital typefaces to a broad market. Our customers include hobbyists, bloggers and shopkeepers — but also high-end advertising agencies, major manufacturers and government bodies.

Fonts that work. We aim to sell only quality fonts, and do not admit any work from new foundries that we regard sub-par. Our main goal is to provide customers with fonts that work under any expectable circumstances. MyFonts has a dedicated Helpdesk, but complaints need to be kept to a minimum. It is the foundries’ responsibility that fonts work well. Even if you think of your fonts as experimental or simply “fun”, they are expected to be usable to average customers.

What MyFonts’ customers hope for

Digital typography and type design have been getting very sophisticated over the past ten years or so. Our professional customers expect fonts that reflect these developments.

Here are some qualities that make us happy when checking out new fonts:

Language support. We cater to a global market, and fonts are increasingly used for multilingual projects in corporate design, branding or packaging. So broad language support is highly appreciated in new fonts. But before you produce a typeface that covers more than just the language(s) you speak, get acquainted with the required shapes of the languages and writing systems in question.

Typographic sophistication. We still need contemporary and innovative font families made with complex editorial design in mind. If the style and design of your type family says “body text” then remember that demanding book and magazine designers want things like small caps, small caps currency symbols, oldstyle (non-lining) and tabular numerals, fractions, superscript and subscript figures, and more.

ExtraLight and ExtraBold weights in text families for impact in headlines……and more.

Our best advice: sketch letters by hand

Drawing type with a pencil, pen or brush is the best way of letting your own talent and style, or even your own limitations show through. To get to a typeface of your own, use your own hands, and your own simple tools. The makers of Glyphs, one of the most popular applications for designing digital fonts, like to hand out their own “sketch tool” at conferences. It’s just two pencils, bound together with a couple of rubber bands. A very nice instrument to imitate the contrast of a wide, flat pen or brush. Be yourself, and use your hands.

Ready?

If you think you know enough now to give it a try, do consult our other Foundry Guides to know
more about type design techniques, family building, pricing, and more.

The purpose of this guide is to point out mistakes that budding type designers often make. It briefly provides information, and points you to more comprehensive resources on how to get things right.

This document focuses on design and production errors.
Broader issues, such as the concept and usefulness of typefaces, their originality and context, are covered in a separate guide titled Are you ready for MyFonts?
Both guides are required reading for type designers contributing new fonts to MyFonts.

If this document contains any technical terms unfamiliar to you, you’ll probably find them in our forthcoming Type Design Glossary (coming soon). For basic typographic terms, see the glossaries by
Gunnlaugur Briem, FontShop, or Typography.Guru.

Incomplete character sets

A professional font is more than A–Z and 0–9. Users need complete punctuation marks, currency symbols beyond the dollar sign, and diacritics (accents, umlauts etc.) including other special characters for languages other than English.

However, we strongly recommend the support of a wider range of languages, for most fonts, especially if your font is intended for professional multi-purpose use.
For our recommendation larger sets, see this section of our Resources Guide: https://foundry.myfonts.com/guides/#character-sets.
When marketing a typeface as a text family, we recommend adding small caps and multiple numeral styles.

Possible exceptions are:

symbol/icon fonts

initials-only fonts; however, we generally do ask for numerals and diacritics here, too!

Unremoved overlaps

Are any paths in your characters overlapping each other? Not good! These need to be joined together into a single path (= one single outline). Otherwise, these overlaps will cause output errors; for instance, they can cause expensive disasters in plotting jobs. Among the usual suspects are glyphs made from two parts: Œ œ Æ æ Ç ç Ð ð Ę ę Ø ø ¥, etc.

A common error often occurs with diacritics. Designers may remove the overlaps in a basic glyph — for instance æ — but forget to do the same for derived glyphs like ǽ and ǣ.

Also, watch out for incorrect path directions, open paths, and accidental duplicate outlines on top of each other.

Inconsistent stroke weights

All glyphs in a font should have the same optical weight. They should each look as light or as dark as all the others. This does not mean that they must all have strokes of exactly the same thickness. But it should appear that they do.

If you scale glyphs down, you must adjust their weight afterwards, making them a bit bolder and sometimes also a bit wider.

Malformed “foreign” glyphs

Designers who are unfamiliar with certain characters or diacritics from another language sometimes make a wild guess about their correct shape. But if these glyphs are drawn in an incorrect or unconventional way, that will probably make the font useless for native users.

Typical errors include:

inverted question mark (¿) points into the wrong direction.

masculine ordinal indicator (º) looks like a zero instead of a superscript letter ‘o’. Wrong, because it needs to harmonize with ª (feminine ordinal indicator): it must have the same optical size and be placed on the same height.

diacritics like those in á ò ê ñ ü ž, etc. have inconsistent shapes and weights, or are on different heights. Harmonize!

dotless i (ı) looks like a figure 1 (one) or a stick. No, instead it should look just like the letter ‘i’ without a dot.

the Icelandic thorn (Þþ) and eth (Ðð) are malformed. Uppercase thorn (Þ) shouldn’t have a descender, nor should it be taller than other capitals. Its belly should (optically) be as large as in P. Lowercase thorn (þ) needs a full ascender and descender. Lowercase eth (ð) shouldn’t have a spur at the bottom right.

dot accent in ė ċ ġ ż etc. doesn’t harmonize with the i dot. Not good. Best practice is to make all dot accents the same as i dot, in terms of size, shape and position.

vertical caron in ď ľ ť creates a gap in words. It shouldn’t! It may look different from an apostrophe.

there’s a German lowercase eszett (ß) in the ß slot of an all-caps or small-caps font. This is incorrect: the default capital eszett should look like a normally spaced double S (SS). You can include a real capital eszett (ẞ) by encoding it as U+1E9E.

Sometimes the L-slash — Ł or ł — is created with a horizontal slash. The slash in the L-slash should always be angled.

Clipping

Clipping is when parts of the character (typically top or bottom; ascenders, descenders and diacritics) are not visible on the screen (or even in print) when a font is used in certain programs.

Clipping happens when glyphs are drawn too large in relation to the font size: some exceed their bounding box. In order to prevent this, the type designer needs to test each font in applications that are known to be sensitive to this problem — in particular Microsoft Office (Word) on Windows. If clipping issues happen, the vertical metrics need to be adjusted.

Lack of overshoots

Font design is full of necessary optical illusions! Have you ever noticed that a circle that is the same height as a square looks smaller when they are placed next to each other?

If the vertical extremes of your round characters (all of them – not just o, O, and zero) align exactly to your font’s baseline and x-height or cap-height, they will look too small next to the font’s other characters, and the text will look irregular.

Rounded characters should “overshoot” all of these internal font measurement guidelines. The exact size of these overshoots, however, is somewhat dependent on what style of font you are drawing, and what its intended point-size is. As a type designer, you’ll need to learn to regulate these things by eye.

Name-related family issues

There are two kinds of technical problems related to naming a font and its family members:

Font names with non-alphabetic characters

Inconsistent style names of the various fonts within a family

Font names: Latin letters only, please. Numerals are OK but not as the first character.

Style naming: check and double-check in various applications.
Sometimes users experience this problem when using a font in a specific application: only some of the weights/style show up in the app’s font menu. The reason behind this is inconsistent style naming: font editors have various fields where style names go, and sometimes the same name ends up in the same field in two different fonts — which disables simultaneous activation.

Menu order: check and double-check in various applications.
In application font menus, do fonts within an individual family appear out of order, or as separate families? Not good! They should appear in a logical order (usually from light to bold) and be united under one family entry.

Style linking: does it work?
If you choose to style-link the family members, please test thoroughly if the result works as intended. For example, in Microsoft Word, if you have a regular weight of a serif typeface and it is not properly style-linked to your true italic weight, the user may see unexpected results. When the user selects the “I” button to italicize the text, it will artificially slant the letters of the regular instead of replacing the regular with your beautifully design and optimised italic.
See the MyFonts Resource Guide: Other technical issues – Font naming

Bad spacing

Any problems with letter spacing issues should NOT be fixed by adding kerning pairs. First, get your basic spacing right. Adjust the sidebearings of each glyph. Only add kerning as a second step, wherever exceptions for specific pairs are necessary (see below).

Has the spacing been approached in the right way in your font? Generally, a glyph like ‘o’ should be optically centered in the middle of the glyph space, with an equal amount of white space to its left and right.

Improper kerning

Most fonts will require kerning, except for monospaced fonts or maybe icon/dingbat fonts.

Kerning and letter spacing are not the same thing. “Kerning” refers to pair-specific adjustments to the space between two characters. Most often, a kerning pair is added to a font to reduce the amount of space between two characters (“negative kerning”). A common example for the application of a kerning pair would be for the space between ‘A’ and ‘V.’ Typically, both ‘A’ and ‘V’ would be spaced so the terminals of their diagonal strokes nearly touch the vertical stroke in the adjacent letter, like an ‘H.’ When a ‘A’ and ‘V’ are set next to each other, however, the spacing looks too open. There can also be instances of “positive kerning,” where additional space is added between two characters.

When you apply kerning to your font, do it systematically. If the uppercase ‘A’ is one of the letters used in a kerning pair, for instance, the same kern may also need to be applied to all instances of the ‘A’ with diacritics, as well as to any formally-related characters present in your font. Also, don’t forget to look at punctuation. In most cases, fonts will need kerning pairs for many uppercase letters + punctuation marks, lowercase letters + punctuation, numerals + punctuation, and even between pairs of punctuation marks themselves (e.g., the comma followed by quotation marks).

Lazy family expansion

Once you have finished your first font, you may want to make an italic or bold companion for it, especially if it is an upright-style font intended for use in text sizes.

It is often a sign of laziness to automatically slant upright fonts instead of drawing italics. Any layout program can slant a roman — graphic designers don’t need an extra font for that. What makes an italic usable and interesting is a different design — radically different in some cases, or subtly adapted to the function and angle in others.

Similarly, don’t just add weight linearly when making a Bold. This will often destroy the contrast and make your font look heavy-handed, with too dark joins and too small counters.

The same goes for other variations, such as outlined or shadowed fonts: Don’t rely on automatic effects. Rather let your eye guide you.

Finally, when creating intermediary weights using interpolation — first study techniques for proper point placement on your extreme weights AND double check every single glyph in every single font. Sometimes strange deformations occur when interpolating. It is crucial to thoroughly check your results and amend where necessary.

Missing OpenType features

Most fonts will require a few basic OpenType features. If you include any sort of alternate version of a character (glyph) in your font, you must also include an OpenType feature for it. Otherwise, it will be difficult for users to access the glyph.

For instance, if your font includes fi and fl ligatures, a feature must be added to your font. Other very common OpenType features include Discretionary Ligatures, Contextual Alternates, Stylistic Sets, Small Caps, and various features for numeral styles.

If your font contains stylistic alternates, please consider making them accessible both via the <SALT> (Stylistic Alternates) feature AND via Stylistic Set(s). As of now, Adobe Illustrator only supports the former, and Adobe InDesign only the latter.

Type Design: Online Resources

Contents

This document is simply an annotated and non-comprehensive list of links to type design-related resources outside of MyFonts.
Some of the linked articles have been written for beginners. Other websites provide information that may also benefit more experienced type designers — resources about diacritics, family structures, and more complex technical issues.

Type Design Basics

How to get started

So you want to create a font, part 1 – Hosted by I Love Typography, this is Alec Julien’s introduction to various techniques of making fonts. It’s from 2007,
so some references aren’t quite up-to-date, but the essence certainly is.

Unfamiliar characters

There are many common characters in the fonts we use that go beyond Aa–Zz and 0–9. They are needed for specific languages or play a role in punctuation or mathematical typesetting. If you’re not familiar with a certain character from this range, it is a bad idea just make a wild guess at their correct shape.

Pricing Fonts

Includes: the pros and cons of discounting

Contents

This guide is about pricing and special offers. We’ll explain how the prices of fonts are established, what different pricing policies are possible and reasonable, and how customers are likely to react. What we won’t do is try to force-feed you a specific
approach to setting prices.

Ultimately, the decision about how much your fonts cost is not MyFonts’ — it’s your foundry’s.

We’ll give background information to help guide your decision making — about customer psychology, economic circumstances, and more. We also give detailed information about how to set up special offers.

The power of pricing

Who decides?

As a rule, font distributors such as MyFonts don’t decide prices. It’s the suppliers — the foundries — that set prices. MyFonts does not orchestrate promotions on its website. The foundries themselves establish timing and discount percentages for special offers.

However, MyFonts imposes rules to prevent abuse of special offers. For instance, we have limited the number of days that foundries are allowed to run a special offer; foundries are obliged to sell a font family at full price for a certain period between special offers.

The price of a digital file

Establishing “the right price” of a font is not so easy. One reason is that, like any product that is distributed over the internet as digital files (apps, music, stock photos, movies, etc.), producing additional copies costs next to nothing. When selling a tangible product, the price of each copy is partly built around the cost of raw material and manufacturing for each copy. But when selling downloadable digital files, there is none of this.

However, one small font file may represent months or even years of dedicated hard work. Good fonts are, in fact, much harder to make than most users realize. How can the price of a small digital file reflect the lifeblood that went into its production?

To many type designers, the price of their typefaces is an emotional thing as much as an economic factor. They feel that a relatively high price expresses appreciation for their work, and low or discounted prices degrade it. However, foundries and distributors cannot ignore economic reality. Like any other business, competition comes with the trade. In order to make a living from fonts, foundries must find an audience that wants to pay for their work — and buy their typefaces rather than those offered by the next vendor.

Know your market

As any economist can tell you, higher prices don’t imply a higher income. The market for fonts is no exception. Recently, lower prices have helped foundries boost their income enormously by reaching a whole new crowd of occasional font buyers.

So pricing is often a question of choosing your niche in the market.

exclusivity: Are you a type designer or foundry that prefers to sell mainly to highly professional, demanding graphic designers and typographers? Then relatively high prices and no discounts may be the best strategy.
When selling at a high price, margins are larger and the profit-per-unit-sold increases; however, the number of units sold will decrease, and so will, quite probably, your total profit.

mass appeal: If you aim to sell type to the masses, then attractive pricing becomes part of the game. Quality, originality and “interestingness” will still play an important part in convincing users to buy your fonts. But occasional font buyers are often persuaded to buy a font family (rather than a single font, or nothing at all) because the price is low enough for them to feel that spending the money is risk-free.

The price of competition

If you choose to try your chances in the mass market for digital type you’ll be competing with big players who have changed the public’s view of how much a font is worth. For many years, software manufacturers such as Adobe and Corel have bundled hefty packs of professional fonts with their design apps, so that the perceived price is zero. Today, more and more distributors are trying out subscription models (often with a free starter program) and systems where people “rent” fonts rather than buying them.

In this rapidly changing market, establishing affordable retail prices can be a powerful tool to continue to sell great fonts where others choose to give away (less great) fonts, or offer flat-rate subscriptions.

Common basic prices

Below are some rough guidelines for basic font prices. We are talking 100% base price for a single Desktop font or Webfont, not discounted prices. If users choose to order an entire family containing many fonts — or several fonts from it — the price-per-font/style may vary considerably according to the Volume Discount Table used. In our Font Licensing Models guide we detail the technicalities of these tables.

These are prices for a basic license. The maximum number of users or computers covered is defined in the EULA (End User License Agreement). Depending on the foundry, this number usually varies between 1 and 5, although there are exceptions.

$0 — free, gratis, libre

MyFonts is not a site for free fonts. Hosting, maintaining and improving the website, customer service, foundry support, and sending newsletters all cost money; we pay all that out of our commission on fonts sold. Even if designers prefer to refrain from getting paid (because they’re idealists with an income outside type design) we cannot be that generous. Too many free fonts on our website would create unfair competition to type designers who do hope to make a living selling type. We welcome occasional free font families from foundries that sell their other fonts at normal prices; and we encourage the inclusion of single free font in a family to lure potential buyers.

Around $5

As a price for single display font family, this is the kind of price range that says “Mediocre stuff”. On the positive side, it may motivate some users with a small budget to buy the font; but a font priced that low is likely to send out a warning signal that a font is not that good.

$10 – $19

Still a low price range for a quality font, and it rarely reflects top quality. However, it does bring your font collection within reach of beginning graphic designers, students, or hobbyist users who feel they cannot afford professional pricing.

$20 – $29

This is a commonly accepted price range for fonts that want to be taken seriously by a broad audience, and hope to attract professionals as well as hobbyists.

$30 – $79

Here’s where it gets serious. Around $40 per font/style is a common price for highly professional typefaces, and some charge considerably more — FontFont, for instance, sells many of its typefaces at $69 per style/per font.

The upper tier of this price range can be regarded as reasonable in case like these:

sophisticated script and display fonts with a large number of OpenType features, such as ligatures, alternates, swash characters — often amounting to 1000–2000 glyphs.

professional text fonts may have a high glyph count because they contain small caps, various numeral styles, and ample language coverage. In fact, one Pro font in OpenType format may contain the contents of up to five fonts in the old formats (PS Type1 or the old TrueType fonts): they had extra fonts for small caps, Central-European, Greek, Cyrillic, swashes and special numeral styles.

$80 – $99

These prices per single style are becoming rare on MyFonts. For some foundries, a price like $99 for a single-font family worked well in the past, if the font in question was large, unique and well equipped with OpenType features and the like — see above. However, increasing competition in this segment has meant that selling fonts at this kind of price has become more difficult.

Over $100

When the euro was strong, this (US dollar) price range still kind of worked for top-notch work — at the mid-2014 exchange rate it showed up as around 75 euros, which didn’t sound as expensive. But in today’s world, that price range is almost a guarantee of selling next to nothing, at least on MyFonts, with its broad customer base.

Basic prices in foreign currency

MyFonts users in many places around the world see and pay prices in their local currency.
Currently, we support seven different localized currencies (and we’re gradually adding more):

US Dollar ($)

British Pound (£)

Euro (€)

Japanese Yen (¥)

Canadian Dollar (C$)

Australian Dollar (A$)

New Zealand Dollar (NZ$)

Value Added Tax (VAT — called USt, TVA, IVA or BTW in other countries) is added during checkout, using the local percentage valid in the country the order is placed from where applicable.

As a foundry, you have two basic options:

Price fonts in United States dollars (USD), and leave conversion to our system. It regularly updates the conversion rate in accordance with internationally established rates.

Establish fixed prices in all seven currencies. In that case, it is up to you to monitor the fluctuations on the financial markets and change prices in response.

Introductory discounts, special offers

When a new typeface is introduced, a special offer can be an effective means of getting noticed, sell a fair number of copies in the first weeks, and consequently end up high on the Hot New Fonts list, and perhaps earn a spot in the Rising Stars newsletter (which is based on sales).
In recent years, these introductory special offer discounts have become rather eye-catching: a 90% discount on a large family is not an exception any more, although 70-80% is more frequent. Again, it’s not MyFonts but the individual foundries who decide about these discounts.

The new strategy has met with some controversy in the typographic world. We’ll briefly discuss the pros and cons.

Pro:

Since the introduction of extreme discounts, customers are more inclined than ever to buy complete type families. Up until a few years ago, single-font purchases were the rule. Lower prices have helped increase awareness of type families, and how they can be useful.

The revenue of successful new families has increased significantly. Although the revenue-per-family-sold can seem very small (sometimes as little as $40 for a family of 10–14 fonts, a tenth or less of the conventional price) the number of copies sold has multiplied. A font family that is discounted 80% in its introductory phase may generate as much revenue in its first two months as a successful normally priced family would in an entire year in the past.

Contra:

The downside of the new strategy is that many font families that are introduced at an extreme discount disappear from view after the first period of success. Others, however, continue to sell well. This usually depends on attractiveness, originality, and the quality of the visual material (“posters” and “flags”) associated with the family.

Pricing has become a dominant factor in determining the success of new fonts. This is partly because MyFonts uses revenue as its main criterion for choosing which new font families to promote. We have always tried to remain objective, and avoid letting the staff’s taste play a strong part in selecting fonts to promote; but rewarding price stunting must have its limits. Spectacular discounts make it easier to successfully sell new font families of less-than-superior quality. MyFonts is finding ways of balancing this out.

Fonts in use improve visibility. While low prices may lead to more sales, it can be argued they don’t necessarily generate more uses. Customers who bought a font just because it was cheap may feel less inclined to put it to actual use than those who shelled out a more significant amount. And fonts that are actually used are those that get exposure and hence continue to sell later.

Double-edged swords:

As prices have become a more important factor in deciding about font purchases, more font purchases have become impulse buys. Some foundries dislike this aspect, because extreme promos seem like a sine-qua-non for successfully introducing a new family. Others don’t mind — they have thrived thanks to the new trend. For them, the lower prices are compensated by massive sales.

Large discounts have helped cause a change in perception of the font-buying public — fonts are now more of a “popular culture” product. In the past, occasional users often complained about fonts being too expensive. More recently, these complaints have become rare. Hobbyists and struggling designers are realizing that fonts are affordable; the perceived “threshold” to buying fonts is much lower.
The downside of this is that people may think less of fonts in terms of a precious product or an exceptional purchase. The “aura” of fonts has diminished, and this can be somewhat painful for those who spend years honing a typeface.

Font Licensing models: Price calculation and pricing tables

Contents

This guide offers insight into the technicalities of font pricing, and how pricing tables for larger quantities are calculated. It also outlines the various licensing models for professional and corporate clients available on MyFonts. These tables for calculating pricing, volume discounts, etc.; are not hewn in stone; they can serve as models for customized tables and tariffs.

Price calculation for license types

Base prices

Before today’s variety of license types were available, customers were ordering them on a custom basis. Over time, several formulas for calculating the base prices for special licensing were tried out.

Below are the formulas that turned out the most effective for making sales. “Base price” applies to the smallest quantity option available (usually a single font). Once the base price for Desktop or Webfont use has been determined, base prices for App, ePub, and Server can be derived from it.

n

Desktop

n

Webfont

n*1.5

Web + Desktop

n*10

App

n*2

ePub

n*10

Server

Thankfully many customers are interested in purchasing more than the smallest quantity. Just as in any other store, price increases with quantity — but price-per-unit will often decrease with quantity. Determining price for greater quantities varies per license type. More on each below.

Desktop

Desktop licensing is ‘Pay Once’. As the name suggests, the license is paid for once. Quantity is based on number of workstation installations, or the number of users of the fonts. You’ll create a Multi-user Pricing Table containing quantity increments and percentages of base price. In this model, price per single unit is reduced with larger quantities as incentive for purchasing larger quantities.

Example

Multi-user Pricing Table

(table abbreviated; it’s possible to have additional rows)

Quantity

% of base price

1-5

100%

6-10

190%

11-15

270%

16-20

340%

21-25

420%

26-30

475%

31-35

550%

36-40

555%

41-50

620%

The first entry is very important. Other license type base prices are dependent on this figure.

With this table, if a customer increases quantity to 12 on cart page, the cart will round out their entry to 15, as a license for 15 covers 12, and a license for 10 is insufficient.

When signing up, MyFonts provides a Multi-user Pricing Table similar to the one above, which is a good starting point, and you’re welcome to change these values as you see fit. Remember — if you list with other vendors too, prices cannot be higher on MyFonts.

Terms and restrictions in a Desktop EULA can also be determining factors for purchase. The most commonly asked question by customers is, “Can I use this font in a logo?”. If the answer to this is ‘Yes’ then perhaps this should clearly be mentioned in your EULA. Convoluted EULAs can deter sales; so imagine you are your own customer reading the EULA. That should encourage the writing to be clear and succinct. Here is an effective example of this from a foundry who frequently appears on the Best Sellers page.

Webfont licenses

Webfont licensing quantity and price is based on number of pageviews. There are two options for customers buying your fonts: ‘Pay Once’ or ‘Pay As You Go’. Only one of these can apply for all web fonts listed by a single foundry. Pricing for either option is defined by a price curve (not percentages like with Desktop fonts).

Pay Once

The Webfonts Pricing Table sets multipliers at specific pageview increments to form a price curve. Points on the curve are prices that appear in the cart. The more rows the table contains, the more control there is on the curve. Multipliers are set for specific pageview increments. The table supplied by default is seen in the example below.

You may change the ‘Multiplier’ and ‘Pageview increment’ figures. Once you’ve entered at least 3 rows, it will build a pricing curve from your samples. Again, add more rows for more control of the price curve.

There is also an option to set an ‘unlimited’ pageview increment. While this option can be attractive, consider all aspects of the market. By offering an ‘unlimited’ license increment, you’re risking loss on recurring revenue. For example, when a customer with a larger website (who pays a lot for their digital assets) pays a one-time fee for the unlimited Pay Once license, they move on — no need to come back and license more pageviews.

For customers that would like to license more pageviews, they’d simply place a new order for the same Pay Once webfont package, for the number of additional pageviews. They can continue using the kit that’s already in use.

Pay As You Go

Webfonts add value to a website. Customers should pay for this value for as long as webfonts appear on their website over time. An alternative option, and we think a more sustainable business model, is the ‘Pay As You Go’ option. This option works nicely for products just coming to market like HTML 5 advertisements. This is a consumption model, where the customer keeps paying as long as they continue to use the product (similar idea to pre-paying for cellphone minutes). It uses the same table like the one above to define prices on the curve for greater quantities.
The customer pays for a licensed number of pageviews that can be used over time. We provide tools to help the customer know when they’ve almost used up the quantity licensed, such as email reminders when they’re running low so they can purchase more. They can license more pageviews directly through their MyFonts account.

App licenses

1. Limited number of app installations

This option similarly uses multipliers to define the price curve, but only uses 3 points to define the curve. They are seen in the table below.

n = base price

Quantity

Multiplier

50,000

10*n

1,000,000

50*n

5,000,000

100*n

This has finer quantity increments than Desktop. Users can change quantity by +/- 1 increments; price is calculated based on where it falls on the curve, relative to the base price.

2. Unlimited number of app installations

With this option, the price is calculated using the following formula:

10*n

n equals the Desktop base price

As quantity is unlimited, it is removed from the formula entirely.

Server

Server licensing is based on number of server CPU cores, so it has finer quantity increments than Desktop. Users can change quantity by +/- 1 increments. Price is calculated using the following formula:

10(n*quantity)

n equals the Desktop base price

The license is time limited — valid for 1 year. We’ll email the customer when the 1 year mark is approaching in case they’d like to renew by purchasing the Server package again.

ePub licenses

ePub licensing is based on number of titles the font will be embedded within. For example, a single book would count as 1 title, and a sequel would be considered a separate title. It uses finer quantity increments than Desktop, so users can change quantity by +/- 1. Price is calculated using the following formula:

2(n*quantity)

n equals the Desktop base price

Volume discounts

As a general rule, fonts become cheaper as the number of fonts ordered from one typeface family increases. A complete family is usually considerably cheaper than the total of all fonts bought separately. As incentive to purchase more products by the same foundry, volume discounts apply in the cart when multiple SKUs from the same foundry are added to it. The cart recognizes the number of SKUs* by the same foundry, then references their Volume Discount Table. In this table, the foundry sets the ‘Upper Boundary’ and ‘Percentage’ figures.

* SKU = Single Shopkeeping Unit, or single sellable unit — in most case: one font

The cart uses the nearest Upper Boundary that volume doesn’t exceed, until the highest upper boundary. If volume exceeds the highest upper boundary, the percentage for highest upper boundary applies.

Example

Volume Discount Table

Upper Boundary

Percentage

1

100

5

75

20

60

1000

50

Using this example:

1 SKU added to cart — cart shows it at full price.

2 SKUs added to cart — cart prices each at 75% of base price (as it exceeds upper boundary of 1, but is less than upper boundary of 5).

18 SKUs added to cart — cart prices each at 60% of base price (as it exceeds upper boundary of 5, but is less than upper boundary of 20).

The Volume Discount Table works in combination with other pricing tables, like the Multi-user Pricing Table. In the cart, Multi-user Discount Table applies first, and price is reduced based on it. Then Volume Discount Table applies to the already reduced price.

Font family pricing

The above table results in rather modest discounts: a family of 20 fonts/styles that costs $40 per single font will not sell at $800 but at 75% of that total: $600 — a price that will still cause many users to decide against licensing the entire family and choose just four single fonts, spending $144.

Many foundries prefer to give customers a stronger incentive to buy a complete family. They establish a family price of, say, $199 or $299, giving the customer flexibility and the foundry a bit more revenue than four basic weights. Part of the logic behind this is that users of a complete family will seldom use all of it, but appreciate the flexibility; after some text they may choose, for instance, to always use the ExtraBold instead of the Bold for enhanced contrast.

Using available MyFonts tools

What sales-related tools or resources do you have, and how can these be used to maximize revenue through optimizing your pricing policy?

Resources at your disposal:

Itemized sales reports

Control of pricing tables

First, get a better understanding of average orders through sales reports. Once you know the average number of SKUs in an order, as well as the average quantity purchased — you can really hone in on your ‘typical customer’ demographic and adjust each pricing table to modify prices more/less for these customers.

To get a sense of your changes being made, experimentation and checking is the easiest way. In other words, adjust the table figures, add items to the cart as if you were a customer, and see how your table changes modified prices in the cart.